Why Combine Food and Drink?

The rationale for combining food and drink comes from noticing that most “drinks” are merely substances which were intended to be food that has been diluted beyond a state of solidity. I added the qualifier “intended to be” so that we could lump things like soda pop, artificial sweeteners, genetically-modified grains and legumes, etc. into this major category. Don’t worry–we will be systematically re-defining those as toxic substances as the story unfolds.

In the “drink” category, the only beneficial liquid that may not truly fall under the “food” category is pure water. Some would categorize pure water as a solvent liquid rather than as an actual food. None-the-less, we all know that life will not exist without it, so for the sake of simplicity, we will call it a food drink.

Less difficult to categorize is alcohol. Given that it is NOT essential to life, and is toxic, it is excluded from the food category. The fact that it is naturally occurring in fermented foods such as beer and wine, for instance, does not persuade us to consider it to be a food any more than does the presence of toxic heavy metals in water, meats and vegetables–even though trace amounts of those heavy metals may be essential to health.